TFVC & Git support

Brian

April 21st, 2015

I got a question on a blog post about differences in TFVC and Git support in TFS and VS Online. Here’s a link to the question for context: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2015/03/12/the-future-of-team-foundation-version-control.aspx#10608301 I can’t answer in a comment with reasonable formatting so I’ll answer in a post. One thing you can check out is an MSDN topic on the subject here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181368.aspx. There’s some useful information there but I feel like that page is trying to do too many things at once – explain some of the feature differences between a distributed version control system and a centralized one, etc. But it you really are looking holistically at how to choose, there are a lot of factors to consider. The page is also a little out of date with respect to feature availability. We’re working on an update to the page to improve it. But I decided to quickly jot an answer here that I think is in the spirit of the question. The question, as I read it, is about comparative feature support. My first reaction to the question is that creating a list of differences is both very short and very misleading – because the vast majority, at this point, is common across the two. The question, of course, is where to draw the line. I could write a 10 page document if I had the time and wanted to try to cover everything I can think of. So I’ve focused on what I think are some of the top features in VSO/TFS and highlighted what support we have in each and the differences. I’m sure I’ve missed some big things. It was a 15 minute exercise.

Feature

TFVC

Git

Comments

Alerts

Y

Y

Android Studio integration

N

Y

Build support

Y

Y

Both Xaml builds & Build v.next. We also have support for both for Jenkins

CodeLens

Y

Y

Some differences. Git works offline. TFVC has a couple more indicators – like incoming changes.

Code review

Y

Y

TFVC has “in IDE” code review. Git has web based pull requests. Later this year the two will be converged and have web and IDE experiences for both

Code search

N

Y

Code search is in private preview and currently only has Git support. We’ll be adding TFVC support this summer.

Cross platform command line

Y

Y

Data warehouse

Y

N

TFVC exposes some warehouse data like code churn. Git does not. Stay tuned for some announcements in this area.

Eclipse Integration

Y

Y

Gated checkin

Y

N

Will have a Git equivalent this summer

High availability/DR

Y

Y

Welcome pages

Y

Y

Work item linking

Y

Y

Some small differences. TFVC can resolve workitems with checkins, Git can’t. Git can #reference work items in commit comments, TFVC can’t. We’ll get parity later this year.

VS integration

Y

Y

TFVC support is a little ahead with Source Control Explorer, a little better Team Explorer integration, Merge visualization, etc.